Resilienz bedeutet Flexibilität, Widerstandsfähigkeit und Anpassungsvermögen. In der Debatte um globale Klima- und Umweltveränderungen erlaubt es das Konzept der Resilienz, soziale, technische und ökologische Katastrophen nicht als vermeidbare gesellschaftliche Probleme aufzufassen, sondern als Chancen, als Generatoren des sozial-ökologischen Wandels umzudeuten.

"Spaceship Earth" was a key metaphor in the late twentieth-century debate over the world’s resources and the future of humankind. This idea of the earth as a vessel in space came of age in an era shaped by space travel and the Cold War. Höhler’s study innovatively brings together technology, science and ecology to explore the way this latter-day ark was invoked by politicians, environmentalists, cultural historians, writers of science fiction and many others across three decades.

„Die Arktis ist heiß“, bemerkte Schwedens Arktis-Botschafter Gustaf Lind im März 2012, und er meinte damit nicht nur die globale Erwärmung (The Economist 2012). Von einem Dasein als globales Randgebiet ist die Arktis ins Zentrum internationaler Politik und Forschung gerückt. Das sich zurückziehende Polareis hat ungeheure kommerzielle und politische Aktivitäten im Zugang zu bislang unerschlossenen Erz- und Öllagerstätten, Fischgründen sowie Wald- und Wildbeständen freigesetzt. Hoffnungen auf Ressourcen, neue Transport- und Handelswege und nicht zuletzt der wachsende Tourismus haben die Arktis zu einem geopolitisch umkämpften Terrain werden lassen. Neben den arktischen Bewohner_innen und den selbst ernannten Arktisstaaten (darunter auch Schweden) umfasst die zunehmende Zahl sogenannter ‚Stakeholder‘ auch geographisch ferne Staaten wie China, Indien und Japan, supranationale Zusammenschlüsse wie die Europäische Union, eine Vielzahl von Nichtregierungsorganisationen (NGOs), wissenschaftlicher Institutionen sowie lokaler und multinationaler Unternehmen, die ihre Ansprüche mit Blick auf globale Sicherheitsfragen zu legitimieren suchen: militärische Sicherheit, Energiesicherheit und Umweltsicherheit.

Around 1970 the world’s oceans were not just another resource to be developed. They were the imaginary place of the inexhaustible, an unlimited reservoir of proteins, mineral resources and human living space, supplementing the exploited landmasses. This article argues that the sciences, technologies and politics of ocean exploration promoted the image of the earth’s biotic and abiotic matter as convertible and replaceable in perfect metabolic cycles. Human matter, the earth’s only excess living resource, was seen as feeding directly into these global supply chains and recycling systems. The eco-technological reorganization of the earth’s environment, based on biomass as the unit of community, opened a historically new dimension of the oceans in the global economy and ecology of flows.

The chapter explores how in the Cold War period large terrestrial and extraterrestrial regions came into focus as sites of strategic importance, areas of expansion or valuable resources: the deep sea, the polar regions and outer space. While the modern world since the 19^th century had been subjected to extensive processes of imperial expansion and territorialization, these regions had escaped sovereign rule; they entered international debate when technology made national claims viable. The chapter studies political ambitions to set up new political and legal regimes of access. It discusses the contested concept of global commons and its legal equivalent, the Common Heritage of Mankind principle, and argues that seemingly opposing concepts of territorialization and communalization were closely related. The commons-regimes of the 1970s, so the suggestion, need to be reinterpreted as a double-edged sword, which failed to introduce a feasible common-based regime and did not overcome but reinforced the earth's spatial organization in terms of territory and sovereignty.

This paper explores the relations between economy and ecology in the last quarter of the 20th century with the example of biodiversity. From its definition in the 1980s, the concept of biodiversity responded not only to conservational concerns but also to hopes and demands of economic profitability. The paper argues that archival systems of inventorying and surveying nature, the biodiversity database and the biodiversity portfolio, changed the view on nature from a resource to an investment. The paper studies. the alliances of ecologists and environmental economists in managing nature according to economic principles of successful asset management, "diversification", with the aim to distribute risk, minimize ecological loss and maximize overall ecosystem performance. Finally, the paper discusses the assumptions and the consequences of transferring principles from financial risk management to landscape management. How has the substitution of the existential values of nature by shareholder value affected the relations between ecology, environment, and ecosystem conservation? Who gains and who looses in exchanging natural capital and financial capital, yields, and profits?